Fans are begging for a Wendy Williams comeback after Sean “Diddy” Combs has been accused of a spate of sexual assault and physical abuse allegations in multiple lawsuits.
During Williams’ media career, the queen of entertainment news and gossip—who has never shied away from addressing celebrity rumors—tried to raise the alarm about Combs. And her ongoing beef with the music mogul may have even caused her career setbacks.
As one social media user put it this past week, “The things she said about diddy was known years ago. Wendy Williams stayed on his neck.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Williams and Combs have a long and contentious history.
Williams began working for New York City’s Hot 97 radio station in 1994. At that time, the Bad Boy record label, which had been founded by Combs in 1993 as a joint venture with Arista Records according to the BBC, heralded talent like the Notorious B.I.G., Lil’ Kim, Ma$e, Faith Evans, and Total, who were constantly on radio rotation.
“Hot 97 launched around the time that Bad Boy launched,” former Bad Boy president Kirk Burrowes said during an interview with the podcast The Art of Dialogue in 2022. “We came with records that helped the rotation to be fulfilled.”
During an episode of the radio show The Wendy Williams Experience that aired in 2009, Williams recounted a time when Combs allegedly instructed members of Total, an all-female R&B trio, to fight her when she worked at Hot 97.
“I got off the air one day, them Total bitches were downstairs, and everybody upstairs at the radio station was looking down, egging it on! Waiting for something to go down!” Williams said, explaining that her boyfriend at the time prevented anything further from happening.
In that same 2022 interview, Burrowes detailed the East Coast-West Coast feud between Bad Boy and Death Row Records in the 1990s and Williams’ involvement. Burrowes claimed that Combs’ infant son and the boy’s mother, Mysa Hylton, were paid to take a picture with Combs’ rival, Suge Knight.
“It got back to the east that [Mysa] was there in the office and that Suge was meeting Justin Combs and possibly holding him in his arms, and that there was a photographer taking a picture,” Burrowes said. “That wasn’t the picture we needed to see on our end or that we wanted the world to see—at all.”
Somehow, Williams got wind of the photo and announced that she had big news coming on her syndicated radio show, and the Bad Boys team had to intervene to prevent the photo from spreading to the public.
Later, Williams had a theory that Combs engaged in sexual activity with other men, and she received a photo of a man allegedly pulling Combs’ shorts down while he was on vacation in Cancun. During an Art of Dialogue interview in 2022, Combs’ former bodyguard Gene Deal said Combs got Williams fired from her job at Hot 97 before she could address the photo on the air.
“The power [Combs] had with the radio stations in New York, motherfuckers didn’t breathe hard if [Combs] didn't want them to. …[Combs] got one of the hottest DJs off Hot 97 because she wanted to put up a picture of him getting his pants pulled down,” Deal said. “[Combs] told Hot 97 if they didn’t get rid of her before he got back in New York, that they was not going to get any music from any of his friends, any of the record labels executives that was cool with him, everyone was going to boycott their station.
“We was out in L.A. for about three days,” Deal added. “Before we landed back in New York, Wendy Williams was in the radio station in Philly. It was over for her. She was fired.”
Williams addressed her ouster from the New York City-area radio market in an interview with VladTV in 2013 while discussing homophobia in hip hop.
“There was a radio personality, once upon a time. Her name was Wendy Williams, and she was practically BURNED AT THE STAKE for talking about such. Now, it’s all come full circle,” Williams said. “There were many situations back in my career, and it’s all coming full circle.”
But what feels most significant in light of recent revelations was the moment that Williams speculated on her televised talk show in 2015 that Combs may have had controlling behavior after he and his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura temporarily split.
“My thing about when you date a mogul, it’s a really difficult thing to avoid them because if you use your head you never know when they’ll pop up on the scene,” Williams told her studio audience, saying the activity would frighten her. “He can hire a plane right now…land on the roof of the hotel she’s staying, pay people off at the front desk, ‘Give me a key and let me up in her room.’”
In November, Ventura filed a lawsuit against Combs, accusing him of rape and physical and emotional abuse. Ventura, who was also signed to Bad Boy, accused Combs of drugging her to perform sexual acts with him and sex workers and being brutally violent during their 11-year rocky relationship.
Just a day after the suit was filed, Combs and his legal team made an undisclosed settlement with Ventura.
Williams and Combs ultimately had a kumbaya moment two years later when the record-label owner made a guest appearance on Williams’ show.
“I know I pissed a lot of people off, including you. But this is a full circle moment,” Williams told Combs, explaining to the audience that she hadn’t seen him in 15 years.
Combs admitted that he was nervous to come on the show, but applauded Williams for being one of the first hip-hop journalists.
Williams proceeded to, uncharacteristically, toss Combs a number of softball questions, asking him mainly about his children and charity work. Then, Combs began to promote his then-latest project: a documentary on the history of Bad Boy Records.
“As African American men and women, we needed to have a story that had a good ending. A success story,” he told Williams.
But then, during another one of Combs’ on-again-off-again stints with Ventura, Williams addressed the break-up on air in 2018, claiming that Ventura wasted her time with a man who was 17 years her senior. Roughly a week after the split was announced, Combs took to social media in an attempt to win back Ventura.
“I suggest don’t use social media, though, to reach out,” Williams commented on the saga. “This was a grand overture from [Combs]. I don’t believe he really wants her or wants her back. I believe he probably treated her at some particular point like a possession. …If you really care, then you’d reach out privately, not publicly.”
After Ventura’s lawsuit was settled, a string of other allegations of abuse poured down on Combs. On Nov. 23, an accuser claimed Combs drugged and raped her when she was a college student at Syracuse University in 1991. The next day, another lawsuit claimed Combs and R&B singer Aaron Hall pressured a woman to drink before raping her. On Wednesday, Combs was accused of gang raping a teenager with music executive Harve Pierre in 2003.
In response to those claims, Combs posted a statement on social media this week that read, in part, “Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”
Williams’ publicist said the former talk show host did not have any comment on the recent allegations against Combs, and Combs’ reps did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment Friday.
